Posts Tagged ‘Cats of Old New York’

To celebrate her beloved cat’s 13th birthday, Mrs. Sarah Knowles held a fancy breakfast in his honor at her home in Brooklyn. Many newspapers across the country picked up the story and waxed poetic about the pampered cat.

Here is the fun tale of Mike, the female Williamsburg Post Office cat. Not only was Mike misnamed, she was “missent.” If there had been an Internet back then, this story would have surely gone viral.

When director Edwin Middleton needed dozens of cats for the comedic moving picture “A Corner in Cats,” he turned to the streets of Flushing and the Bide-a-Wee home for animals in Manhattan.

This fun tale features cats, a film studio in Flushing, Queens, and an old mansion in College Point with secret tunnels that may have been a stop on the Underground Railroad.

A few human engineers have tried to take credit for conceiving the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. But it was a pampered pet cat that first got the ball rolling for the clever and successful concept. Yes, a cat.

Many historians and fans of Edgar Allan Poe are no doubt familiar with Catarina, the cat that served as Poe’s muse while he was living in his old cottage in Fordham. But I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find many people, if any at all, who know about Jig or the other black cat of Poe Cottage.

Now you can be one of the few who know this obscure feline fact.